Pep Le Pew is a character from the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons, first introduced in 1945. Depicted as a French striped skunk, Pep is constantly in search of love and appreciation. However, his offensive skunk odor and his aggressive pursuit of romance typically cause other characters to run from him.[1]
Pep Le Pew storylines typically involve Pep in pursuit of a female black cat, whom Pep mistakes for a skunk ("la belle femme skunk fatale"). The cat, who was retroactively named Penelope Pussycat, often has a white stripe painted down her back, usually by accident (such as by squeezing under a fence with wet white paint). Penelope frantically races to get away from him because of his putrid odour, his overly aggressive manner or both, while Pep hops after her at a leisurely pace.
The setting is always a mise-en-scne echoing with fractured French. They include Paris in the springtime, the Sahara, the Matterhorn, or the little village of N'est-ce Pas in the French Alps. The exotic locales, such as Algiers, are drawn from the Pep Le Moko story. Settings associated in popular culture with romance, such as the Champs-lyses or the Eiffel Tower, are sometimes present.[2]
Pep describes Penelope as lucky to be the object of his affections, and uses a romantic paradigm to explain his failures to seduce her. For example, he describes a hammer blow to his head as a form of flirtation rather than rejection. Accordingly, he shows no sign of narcissistic injury or loss of confidence no matter how many times he is rebuffed.[2]
In a role-reversal, the Academy Award-winning[3] 1949 short For Scent-imental Reasons ended with an accidentally painted (and now terrified) Pep being pursued by a madly smitten Penelope (who has been dunked in dirty water, leaving her with a ratty appearance and a developing head cold, completely clogging up her nose). It turns out that Pep's new color is just right for her (plus the fact that the paint now covers his putrid scent). Penelope locks him up inside a perfume shop, hiding the key down her chest, and proceeds to chase the now imprisoned and effectively odorless Pep.
In another short, Little Beau Pep, Pep, attempting to find the most arousing cologne with which to impress Penelope, sprays a combination of perfumes and colognes upon himself. This resulted in something close to a love-potion, leading Penelope to fall madly in love with Pep in an explosion of hearts. Pep is revealed to be extremely frightened of overly-affectionate women ("But Madame!"), much to his dismay, as Penelope quickly captures him and smothers him in more love than even he could imagine.
And yet again, in Really Scent, Pep removes his odor by locking himself in a deodorant plant so Penelope (or known as "Fabrette", in this instance a black cat with an unfortunate birthmark) would like him (this is also the only episode that Pep is acutely aware of his own odor, having checked the word "Pew" in the dictionary). However, Penelope (who in this picture is actually trying to have a relationship with Pep because all the male cats of New Orleans take her to be a skunk and run like blazes, but is appalled by his odor) had decided to make her own odor match her appearance and had locked herself in a Limburger cheese factory. Now more forceful and demanding, Penelope quickly corners the terrified Pep, who, after smelling her new stench, wants nothing more than to escape the amorous female cat. Unfortunately, she will not take "no" for an answer and proceeds to chase Pep off into the distance, with no intention of letting him escape.[a]
Although Pep usually mistakes Penelope for a female skunk, in Past Perfumance, he realizes that she is a cat when her stripe washes off. Undeterred, he proceeds to cover his white stripe with black paint, taking the appearance of a cat before resuming the chase.
To emphasise Pep's cheerful dominance of the situation, Penelope is always mute (or more precisely, makes only natural cat sounds, albeit with a stereotypical "le" before each one) in these stories; only the self-deluded Pep speaks (several non-recurring human characters are given minimal dialogue, often nothing more than a repulsed "Le pew!").
Sometimes this formula is varied. In his initial cartoon, Odor-able Kitty, Pep (who was revealed to be an American skunk named Henry in this short) unwittingly pursues a male cat who has deliberately disguised himself as a skunk (complete with the scent of Limburger cheese) in order to scare off a bunch of characters who have mistreated him. Scent-imental Over You has Pep pursuing a female dog who has donned a skunk pelt (mistaking it for a fur coat). In the end, she removes her pelt, revealing that she is a dog. Pep then "reveals" himself as another dog and the two embrace. However, he then reveals to the audience that he is still a skunk. In Wild Over You, Pep attempts to seduce a wild cat that has escaped a zoo (during what is called "Le grande tour du Zoo" at a 1900 exhibition), and painted herself to look like a skunk to escape her keepers. This cartoon is notable for not only diverging from the Pep/female-black-cat dynamic, but also rather cheekily showing that Pep likes to be beaten up, considering the wild cat thrashes him numerous times. Really Scent is also a subversion with Penelope (here called "Fabrette") attracted to him from the beginning, removing the need for Pep to chase her as she goes to him. But Pep's scent still causes a problem for her as they try to build a relationship.
Chuck Jones, Pep's creator, wrote that Pep was based (loosely) on the personality of his Termite Terrace colleague, writer Tedd Pierce, a self-styled "ladies' man" who reportedly always assumed that his infatuations were reciprocated.[4] :119 Pep's voice, provided by Mel Blanc, was based on Charles Boyer's Pp le Moko from Algiers (1938), a remake of the 1937 French film Pp le Moko. Eddie Selzer, animation producerand Jones' bitterest foeat Warners then once profanely commented that no one would laugh at those cartoons.[4] :92 However, this did not keep Selzer from accepting an award for one of Pep's pictures several years later. There have been theories that Pep was based on Maurice Chevalier. However, in the short film, Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood, Jones says Pep was actually based on himself, but that he was very shy with girls, and Pep obviously was not. A prototype Pep appears in 1947's Bugs Bunny Rides Again, but sounds similar to Porky Pig.
In the shorts, a kind of pseudo-French or Franglais is spoken and written primarily by adding "le" to English words (example: "le skunk de pew"), or by more creative mangling of French expressions with English ones, such as "Sacr Maroon!", "My sweet peanut of brittle", "Come to me, my little melon-baby collie!" or "Ah, my little darling, it is love at first sight, is it not, no?", and "It is love at sight first!" The writer responsible for these malapropisms was Michael Maltese.
Some dialogue from the Oscar-winning 1949 short For Scent-imental Reasons:
Blanc's voice for the character closely resembles the one he used for "Professor Le Blanc", the harried violin instructor on The Jack Benny Program.
Pep Le Pew's cartoons were dubbed in French; in the French version (Pp le putois), Pep speaks with a heavy Italian accent. His voice is a parody of Yves Montand.[b]
Chuck Jones first introduced the character (originally named Stinky) in the 1945 short Odor-able Kitty (see "Variations"), in which he was revealed to be a married American skunk named Henry who had been faking his French accent. For the remaining cartoons Jones directed, Pep retained his accent, nationality, and purported bachelor status throughout, and the object of his pursuit was nearly always female.
A possible[vague] second cameo appearance is at the end of Fair and Worm-er (Chuck Jones, 1946). This skunk doesn't speak, but looks identical (or is a close relation) and shares the same mode of travel and a slight variation of Pep's hopping music. His function here is to chase a string of characters who had all been chasing each other ( la "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly").
A skunk often identified as Pep appears in the Art Davis-directed cartoon Odor of the Day (1948); in this entry, the theme of romantic pursuit is missing as the skunk (in a non-speaking role, save for a shared "Gesundheit!" at the finish) vies with a male dog for lodging accommodations on a cold winter day. This is one of the two cartoons where the character, if this is indeed Pep, uses his scent-spray as a deliberate weapon: shot from his tail as if it were a machine gun. The other one is Touch and Go, where he frees himself from the jaws of a shark by releasing his odor into the shark's mouth.
Pep makes a more obvious cameo in Dog Pounded (1954), where he is attracted to Sylvester after the latter tried to get around a pack of guard dogs, in his latest attempt to capture and eat Tweety, by painting a white stripe down his back (in Pep's only appearance in a Freleng short).
Pep possibly makes a small appearance as a baby skunk in Mouse-Placed Kitten (1959), where he is reluctantly adopted by a mouse couple at the cartoon's end.
Pep was going to have a cameo in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but was later dropped for reasons unknown.[1]
Pep made several cameo appearances on the 1990 series Tiny Toon Adventures as a professor at Acme Looniversity and the mentor to the female skunk character Fifi La Fume. He appeared briefly in "The Looney Beginning" and had a more extended cameo in "It's a Wonderful Tiny Toon Adventures Christmas Special". The segment "Out of Odor" from the episode "Viewer Mail Day" saw character Elmyra disguise herself as Pep in an attempt to lure Fifi into a trap, only to have Fifi begin aggressively wooing her.
Pep also made a cameo appearances in the Histeria! episode "When America Was Young" and in the Goodfeathers segment, "We're No Pigeons", on Animaniacs.
In the 1995 animated short Carrotblanca, a parody/homage of the classic film Casablanca, both Pep and Penelope appear: Pep (voiced by Greg Burson) as Captain Renault and Penelope (voiced by Tress MacNeille) as "Kitty Ketty" (modeled after Ingrid Bergman's performance as Ilsa). Unlike the character's other appearances in cartoons, Penelope (as Kitty) has extensive speaking parts in Carrotblanca.
In The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries, in the episode, "Platinum Wheel of Fortune", when Sylvester gets a white stripe on his back, a skunk immediately falls in love with him. This is not Pep, but a similar character identified as "Pitu Le Pew" (voiced by Jeff Bennett). However, he does say, "What can I say, Pep Le Pew is my third cousin. It runs in the family". Pep would later appear in the episode "Is Paris Stinking" (once again voiced by Greg Burson), where he pursues Sylvester who is unintentionally dressed in drag. Pep would appear once more in Tweety's High-Flying Adventure, falling in love with both Sylvester and Penelope (Sylvester had gotten a white stripe on his back from Penelope as they fought over Tweety), actually showing a preference for Sylvester.
Pep was, at one point, integral to the storyline for the movie Looney Tunes: Back in Action (voiced by Bruce Lanoil). Originally, once Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, DJ, and Kate arrived in Paris, Pep was to give them a mission briefing inside a gift shop. Perhaps because of the group receiving their equipment in Area 52, Pep's scene was cut, and in the final film, he plays only a bit part, dressed like a police officer, who tries to help DJ (played by Brendan Fraser) after Kate (played by Jenna Elfman) is kidnapped. However, some unused animation of him and Penelope appears during the end credits, thus giving viewers a rare glimpse at his cut scene, and his cut scene appears in the movie's print adaptations. Pep also appears in Space Jam (voiced by Maurice LaMarche), where his voice has curiously been changed into an approximation of Maurice Chevalier, as opposed to more traditional vocalization.
In Loonatics Unleashed, a human based on Pep Le Pew called Pierre Le Pew (voiced by Maurice LaMarche) has appeared as one of the villains of the second season of the show. Additionally, Pep and Penelope Pussycat appear as cameos in a display of Otto the Odd in the episode "The Hunter." In the episode "The World is My Circus," Lexi Bunny complains that "this Pep Le Pew look is definitely not me" after being mutated into a skunk-like creature.
A 2009 Valentine's Day-themed AT&T commercial brings Pep (voiced by Jeff Bennett) and Penelope's relationship up to date, depicting Penelope not as repulsed by Pep, but madly in love with him. The commercial begins with Penelope deliberately painting a white stripe on her own back; when her cell phone rings and displays Pep's picture, Penelope's lovestruck beating heart bulges beneath her chest in a classic cartoon image.
A baby version of Pep Le Pew appeared in Baby Looney Tunes. In the episode "New Cat in Town," everyone thought that he was a cat. Sylvester was the only one who knew the truth. When Daffy was playing with a laptop, Sylvester removed the battery because he was afraid that everybody would avoid him. We also see a grown up version of him on the laptop. In another episode, titled "Stop and Smell Up the Flowers", Pep Le Pew is shown to be good friends with a baby Gossamer, and seemed slightly older than his previous appearance.
Pep Le Pew has appeared in The Looney Tunes Show episode "Members Only" voiced by Ren Auberjonois in Season One and by Jeff Bergman in Season Two. He was present at the arranged marriage of Bugs Bunny and Lola Bunny. Of course Lola eventually fell in love with Pep Le Pew. He also made a short cameo appearance with Penelope Pussycat in the Merrie Melodies segment "Cock of the Walk" sung by Foghorn Leghorn. He appeared in his own music video "Skunk Funk" in the 16th episode "That's My Baby". He also appeared again in another Merrie Melodies segment "You Like/I Like" sung by Mac and Tosh. His first appearance in the second season was in the second episode, entitled, "You've Got Hate Mail", reading a hate-filled email accidentally sent by Daffy Duck. He also had a short appearance in the Christmas special "A Christmas Carol" where he takes part in the song "Christmas Rules." In "Gribbler's Quest," Pep Le Pew is shown to be in the same group therapy with Daffy Duck, Marvin the Martian, and Yosemite Sam.
Pep Le Pew made a cameo in a MetLife commercial in 2012 titled, "Everyone". In it, he was shown hopping along in the forest and when he sees his love interest Penelope Pussycat uptop the back of Battle Cat, he immediately hops after her.
Pep Le Pew has appeared in Looney Tunes: Rabbits Run voiced by Jeff Bergman. In this film, he is the head of a major perfumery who Lola wants to create a signature scent for.
Pep Le Pew appeared in the video games, Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 3, Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal, The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Bugs Bunny Rabbit Rampage, and Bugs Bunny: Crazy Castle 4.
In October 2010, it was reported that Mike Myers would voice Pep Le Pew in a feature-length live action film based on the character, although no information about this project has surfaced since.[5] In July 2016, it was revealed at San Diego Comic-Con that Max Landis was penning a Pep Le Pew feature film for Warner Bros.[6]
Pep Le Pew was referenced in the song Beeswax by popular American rock band Nirvana.[7]
(Directed by Chuck Jones unless otherwise indicated)
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